1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a similar image search apparatus and a computer readable medium.
2. Related Art
Digitized diagnostic images can easily be obtained by the propagation of medical equipment such as CT (computed-tomography) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners, and by storing these diagnostic images as digital data, the diagnostic images can easily be managed and used commonly by medical practitioners or doctors. In addition, in many cases, diagnostic images so stored are managed with being associated with diagnostic reports which describe opinions on the diagnostic images and diagnostic results based thereon by doctors. Attempts have been made to make effective use of a data base of disease examples which has these diagnostic images and diagnostic reports.
As one example of such attempts, there is an attempt to increase the accuracy of diagnosis by searching a similar disease example to a diagnostic image of a patient from the data base and referring to a diagnostic result described in the disease example so searched.